Will Constituents Simply Take Their Elected Representatives’ Word for It?

Political communications research has found that elites enjoy wide latitude to shape mass opinion but also identified important constraints on opinion leadership in competitive democracies. To win over the public, political leaders must generally mobilize party loyalties, secure interest group endorsements, and make persuasive arguments to support their views. Influential research (Broockman & Butler, 2017) calls these constraints into question by raising the possibility that elected officials can sway their constituents’ opinions about policy merely by declaring their own stances, without providing substantive justifications or group cues. Such “position adoption,” in which ordinary citizens simply defer to politicians’ authority, would mean that the public is more pliant than previous research suggests. To examine this possibility, we report on four experimental studies that assess the effect of unelaborated “position-taking cues” from elected representatives on their constituents’ policy opinions. We find no evidence that the bare articulation of a representative’s position changes constituents’ opinions, whereas many of the group cues and substantive arguments included in these experiments have sizable influences on opinions measured in our studies. These results cast doubt on the most pessimistic interpretation of elite opinion leadership.